Document processing systems optically read information from documents. Numerous optical character recognition techniques are utilized for distinguishing between different print fonts and for identifying the individual characters themselves. As used herein, the word "characters" shall include alphanumeric characters as well as bar code data. Characters may be printed in a continuous format typically referred to as contiguous print or in a dot matrix print format in which rows and columns of dots are utilized to create a character.
Since character recognition involves numerous parameters associated with a character, whether a character is contiguous or represented by dot matrix print is an important piece of information in recognizing the character. Various template and feature recognition algorithms are utilized for optical character recognition techniques. Different masks for template recognition are utilized to recognize dot matrix print since feature recognition algorithms do not produce the desired results in recognizing dot matrix print characters. Therefore, if the presence of a dot matrix print character were known, algorithms that are specifically directed to the recognition of dot matrix print characters could be utilized instead of methods for recognizing contiguous characters. Further, knowledge of the presence or absence of a dot matrix print character would be useful in character segmentation and contextual post-processing of the recognition results.
A need has thus arisen for a dot matrix print detector for identifying the presence or absence of a dot matrix print character to assist in the character recognition process.